


when the sun came up, i was looking at you

by jemmasimmmons



Series: are we out of the woods yet? [4]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, fitzsimmons falling back together again, no potential triggers, other team members appear briefly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-22
Updated: 2015-09-22
Packaged: 2018-04-22 19:16:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4847171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jemmasimmmons/pseuds/jemmasimmmons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She wanted to tell him. She wanted to tell him so badly, so that she didn’t have to hold onto it alone anymore. She wanted his help, just like she had always wanted, to understand the problem. Then, maybe they would be able to fix it.</p><p>But she couldn’t tell him. Not just yet. She still needed more proof."</p><p>Emerging from the Kree rock had consequences. Jemma struggles to discover them alone until Fitz shows her she doesn't have to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when the sun came up, i was looking at you

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this in my drafts since early June and it's the whole reason I started to write this series. Frustratingly, it took much longer to write up than I'd wanted and didn't turn out how I'd expected, but that's not always a bad thing! It's the exploration I promised ages ago of the more...physical effects being in the Kree rock had for Jemma and is almost a 'fix-it-before-it's-broken' for season 3.
> 
> You don't need to have read the previous parts to this series to read and understand this part, but it might help as there are references to events that happen in them!
> 
> And just as a note, I'm on tumblr @jeemmasimmons if you want to talk to me or ask any questions about this fic or my others. The title comes (surprise, surprise) from Taylor Swift's 'Out Of The Woods'. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy this!

 

 

It started with Skye.

In retrospect, Jemma realised that this shouldn’t have really surprised her as much as it did.

Most things, it seemed, started with Skye.

 

 

The first time it happened was in the cabin room they shared at the forest campsite on the last night of their holiday. More specifically, it happened in the bed they were sharing. Skye was asleep again, snoring gently, while Jemma drifted somewhere between sleep and wakefulness.

Her body had been hovering on the verge of dipping her into a deep and dreamless sleep when it happened. Like someone had flicked a switch on in her mind suddenly Jemma saw colour, a sequence of colours dancing before her closed eyelids that might have formed memories if she could focus on them hard enough.

 _Click_.

There was grey, colourless and familiar as she walked down a long corridor holding hands with a nun; there was blue, the open expanse of the sky.

 _Click_.

Then, red was bursting through the blue along with the hot pain of a gunshot; and then purple, a deep, searing violet, that pierced at her mind and reached through her gut to emit a low rumble, vibrating through her body and reaching so far inside her that it hurt.

The pain jerked Jemma awake and she gasped, her eyes flying back open. There was a ringing in her ears as she looked worriedly across the bed to Skye before reaching out an arm to wake her too, eager to help her reign in her powers again, to stop the room from shaking. Jemma’s fingertips were close enough to Skye’s skin that she could feel the prickle of the hairs on her arms before she realised that there was no point in waking her friend.

Because their room wasn’t actually shaking.

Slowly, Jemma retracted her fingers and listened. There were no car alarms going off, no shouts from the other guests in the park calling out earthquake warnings. There was no May trying to break a window to get in to them. The world around her was still filled with the same empty expanse of silence that it had been all night. Even the wastepaper bin in the corner of the room was still upright.

In fact, the only evidence that there had been an earthquake at all was the slight tremor Jemma could still feel in her own fingers.

Jemma lay back on the pillow, trying to calm her thumping heart. It must have just been a dream, she reasoned. That was the only possible explanation; she must have been closer to sleep than she’d thought and it had been a particularly vivid dream. Jemma remembered the snippets of memories she had seen flicker through her mind, and shivered.

She was no strangers to dreams, or nightmares really, but those hadn’t felt like her own. They had felt like Skye’s. Again, Jemma glanced along the bed to her sleeping friend; Skye’s mouth was parted slightly in sleep and she had one arm flung out of the covers nearly touching Jemma’s pillow. There was nothing on her face to suggest discomfort in her sleep. Jemma swallowed hard as a deep chill ran down the length of her spine and she shivered suddenly, despite the muggy warmth of the room. And then, the chill was gone.

She turned onto her side away from Skye and brought the sheets up to tuck them under her chin again.

A dream, Jemma thought firmly. That was all it had been. She had just been dreaming.

She lay there, repeating the doubtful words to herself, until the pulls of sleep tugged her under again. By the morning, she had almost forgotten it had happened at all.

 

The second time it happened was back at the base, maybe a week later. Jemma was making her way down from her bunk to the lab, sliding an extra kirby grip into her hair to pin back a reckless strand, when she saw Skye hovering in the doorframe of her own bunk.

Jemma skidded to a halt, a smile coming to her face as she opened her mouth to call out good morning. Since returning from their holiday, she had hardly seen her friend; Skye was working so often with Mack on tracking down Inhumans. Maybe, Jemma thought with a lift in her heart, they could walk down to the lab together this morning.

But then she saw what Skye was holding in her hand and her smile vanished almost as soon as it had appeared.

Skye was brushing back the skirt of her hula girl figurine as she held it in her palm with a sad smile on her face and as Jemma watched, she felt her mind tilt from under her again.

 _Click_.

Suddenly, she was no longer standing in the base, but sitting in a van that smelt like cinnamon sticks and pine air freshener, and she could see the small doll dancing up and down on the dashboard. She felt giddiness, and a laugh in her throat, but there was a bitter emptiness behind that laugh that she was trying so hard to push down, to forget about.

And then she felt the rumble, just like she had in the cabin room, and this time it hit her so strongly that she stumbled as she fell out of the memory, gasping as she reached out a hand for the wall to steady herself.

Skye’s head jerked up, and Jemma quickly pulled herself back behind the wall so that she wouldn’t see her, and closed her eyes until she heard Skye’s footsteps fall away down the corridor and the overwhelming dizziness had left her. Then, she let her body sink to the ground and tried to catch her breath.

The unpleasant taste of bile rose in Jemma’s throat as she realised that what had happened in the cabin room could not have been a dream. How could it have been, when she had just experienced the exact same feeling just then?

You couldn’t dream while you were wide awake.

Jemma exhaled, and found that her breath came out in a deep shudder as goose bumps rose up on her arms, prickling at her skin.

She hadn’t been dreaming just now. Which meant something else.

Something else was happening to her. And now she needed to find out what that was.

 

The incidents, which Jemma came to refer to herself rather reluctantly as her ‘clicks’, started to happen more and more frequently over the next few weeks. They became clearer too; the colours flashing in her mind becoming gradually sharper until they were fully formed memories, playing over like old tapes on a projector screen.

The clicks happened most often with Skye, although once or twice they happened with Lincoln too when he was at the base. The sensation wasn’t ever pleasant, not even with Skye, but Jemma found that ‘clicking’ into Lincoln’s memories was even more disjointing for some reason.

It wasn’t that the images she saw in her head with him were especially sinister but they were more distant, like Lincoln was doing his best to keep even himself separated from his memories, whereas Skye’s mind was incredibly open. There was darkness too, a secret buried deep underneath that, which Jemma could feel pulling at the corners of her mind before the fizzle of electricity hit at the base of her spine and she was jerked back out of his head with relief. That was another thing that disturbed her about clicking with Lincoln: the sparks of electric current that always came with leaving his mind shook her even more than Skye’s quakes did.

The feeling of clicking with Lincoln disturbed her so much that she began to avoid him, not maliciously but noticeably. Lincoln certainly noticed and politely did his best to keep a certain level of distance between them too, obviously assuming he had done something to upset her. It made Jemma feel immeasurably guilty, as she imagined all the reasons that he must have for her animosity, and she wished she could properly explain. But she couldn’t, not right now. She didn’t dare tell _anybody_ about what was happening to her, not just yet.

She became better at concealing the clicks when they happened; once or twice even being able to anticipate their coming and was able to excuse herself from the room before her mind slipped into someone else’s and the dizziness that always came with that threatened to overcome her. She wasn’t really in control of them; she couldn’t go as far as to say that. But she was trying to be.

It was all she could keep doing for now, at least until she understood a little more.

 

Since Jemma’s accident with the monolith, things at the Playground had returned more or less to a vague resemblance of normality, with missions and lab work and trying to fix whatever shattered remnants they had left of their organisation. Unfortunately, that seemed to be becoming an annual occurrence.

The emergence of fish oil pills infected with terrigen crystals had resulted in new instances of Inhumans almost daily, and it was with a grim determination that her teammates were trying to round them up before they did harm to the public or themselves.

It was on one of these missions to find a group of rogue Inhumans that Jemma lost control of her clicks for the first time.

It was her first mission away from the base since coming back. Reports had come in from Boston of a group of potential Inhumans holed up in the basement of an abandoned multi-storey carpark. They were kids really, barely out of their teens, so it was decided that only a small group would head in to assess the situation. Skye was there to act as ambassador and go-between for the two teams, Hunter was her back-up, May was the emergency backup and pilot, while Jemma was there in case any of the kids needed medical attention and then to take blood samples for the index if they were willing.

It was supposed to have been an easy mission, absolutely nothing to worry about. But of course, things rarely ended up that way.

 

‘I’m in first. I’ll introduce myself, get them comfortable and explain the situation. Then, I’ll call you guys in. Got it?’

May had landed them on the roof of the carpark, the Quinnjet’s cloaking on. She had then stayed there while Jemma followed Hunter and Skye down the back staircase and through several floors until they reached the ground floor. There, they came to a halt at the bottom of the stairwell next to the heavy emergency exit door to the basement.

The place was dusty and clearly abandoned but there was something solid about the echoes of their boots on the ground that told Jemma the place was still occupied.

‘It’s your call, Supergirl,’ Hunter grunted, adjusting the gun on his back. Skye looked at Jemma and rolled her eyes at the nickname before raising an eyebrow.

Understanding the unspoken question and the apprehension in her friend’s eyes at leaving her, Jemma nodded.

‘I’m fine, Skye. Go.’

Shooting her one last uncertain look, Skye pushed open the door and disappeared through it. Hunter blocked the door open with a broken piece of glass he’d picked up from the floor and then motioned Jemma backwards, in case one of the kids freaked and things got ugly.

Jemma pressed her back against the wall of the stairwell and tried to breathe evenly in through her nose and out through her mouth. The air inside the carpark was heavy and stiflingly hot, and she could feel a small trickle of sweat running down her spine through her jacket.

Hunter was poised at the door, finger on the trigger of his ICER and she could hear the echoing thumps of Skye’s retreating footsteps through the basement. _Funny_ , Jemma thought absently to herself. _The footsteps seem to be getting louder as Skye goes further away_.

It was only when her vision tunnelled and she had to suck in a breath that Jemma realised in horror that those were not Skye’s footsteps she could hear.

_Oh no. Oh, please not now._

_Click_.

The flickering images came to her in such rapid succession she thought she’d be swept away by them, but they were gone almost before she had seen them fully formed in her mind. She saw a baby mobile, a single red boot on the floor and then a bloody hand reaching backwards for her. There was a broken pile of glass, another hand clutching a shard of it tightly in their fist, and then she was looking down the stairwell she had descended with her own friends just minutes ago. Flanking her on either side, she could feel people she felt familiarity with, companionship, _love_ for standing waiting for her to make the first move.

 _Click_.

The images were shattered by a harrowing feeling of despair, that hit Jemma right in her chest and made her want to sink to her knees and howl. The feeling lasted for only a fraction of a second before it was washed away, replaced by whispers, dozens and dozens of whispers filling every inch of her brain until it felt like they were seeping out from her pores.

The noise was deafening, it _hurt_ , and Jemma was biting back the urge to scream from the pain when her chest tightened, to the point where it felt like her lungs were being squeezed shut with a vice in a sensation that was hauntingly familiar. This time, she didn’t need someone else to point it out for her. She couldn’t breathe.

 _I can’t breathe_.

The world tipped, and this time Jemma couldn’t hold back the blackness before it pulled her under.

She woke up back on the Quinnjet, with her head in Skye’s lap while her friend barked for Hunter to hand her a damn water bottle _now_. May brought the jet back into the Garage at what felt like a highly dangerous speed, and Jemma felt her heart sink as the cargo hold door lowered to reveal a white-faced Fitz waiting for them.

Her protests that she felt absolutely fine now fell on deaf ears, and before she knew what was happening, Jemma found herself being marched straight back down to the med bay, where she sat on a bed, rubbing at the spot inside the crook of her elbow where the needle had gone in.

Fitz paced up and down in front of her, refusing to sit, all the while staring at his tablet for the results of her blood test to come back. When they did, he shook his head incredulously at the screen and demanded they be tested again.

Her blood sugar levels were normal. So was her core body temperature, her hydration; even the levels of vitamin c in her body were what they should be. Just as Jemma had suspected, there was absolutely no medical reason for why she had collapsed at all.

Fitz sat down heavily on the end of her bed, still staring blankly at the tablet screen as if the results would rearrange themselves before his eyes and he would be able to explain what had been wrong with her.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said helplessly, and Jemma felt her heart twinge.

She wanted to tell him. She wanted to tell him so badly, so that she didn’t have to hold onto it alone anymore. She wanted his help, just like she had always wanted, to understand the problem. Then, maybe they would be able to fix it.

But she couldn’t tell him. Not just yet. She still needed more proof.

Tentatively, Jemma reached out a hand to cover one of Fitz and squeezed it comfortingly. ‘I don’t understand either,’ she told him. And it was the truth. She didn’t understand.

But she was starting to.

 

Back at the Academy, Jemma Simmons had been legendary for her uncanny ability to be up till the small hours of the morning and still be bright eyed and functional for her 7:00am classes the next morning.

This had been a talent that Fitz had both deeply envied, as he uttered deep, primal groans when she tugged him out from under his covers for their morning lecture, and worried about in equal parts. The worry had only grown once they had transferred to the team, and suddenly Jemma’s talent wasn’t being put to use to help her stay up late partying, but instead to work furiously in the lab until her eyes itched.

Since her return from Hydra, however, he had never come down to pull her away from her late night working like he had before, and a part of Jemma’s mind had whispered traitorously to her on more than one occasion that he didn’t care about her enough anymore to worry, that she didn’t deserve his concern.

That little voice had been silenced, however, when after the Boston incident she mentioned casually to him that she was going to start going to bed earlier.

The delight on Fitz’s face could have been enough to light up a small village.

‘Really?’ he had yelped out, before catching himself and lowering his voice to a more normal pitch. ‘I mean…that’s great, that’s really, really…good.’ He grinned at her, and the relief that Jemma could see written across his features made her heart sink. ‘That’s going to be really, really good for you. You look like you could use more sleep.’

Jemma returned the smile as best she could, then gave a soft exhale as she moved forward to wrap one arm around his neck. It had become easier to do this in the past few weeks, since their hastily put together date in her room. He kept insisting again and again that he would take her on a second date, to somewhere outside the base, his voice strangely shy for the Fitz she knew. She would laugh back at him and tease about the amount of free time they got not allowing them to fix a cup of _tea_ together, let alone a whole meal. They were easing back into one another again and it was more than Jemma had ever dared hope for.

Fitz’s entire body relaxed into her embrace as he brought one arm carefully up and around her back to return it and Jemma let her face rest in his shoulder for a brief moment, if only to hide the guilt on her face.

‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ she murmured, and leant up to press a chaste kiss to his cheek on a whim. The look on Fitz’s face when she pulled away was enough to convince her that it had been the right thing to do.

 She wasn’t really lying to him, Jemma insisted to herself later as she sat on her bed setting an alarm the next morning. She really was going to bed early; she just wasn’t doing it for the sake of her health.

She had found that it was much easier to get up at 2 o’clock in the morning if you’d been sleeping since nine the previous night.

 

When her phone went off against her chest Jemma quickly curled inwards, muffling the sound while her fingers fumbled to turn off the alarm before anyone else heard it. Sliding her feet out of bed, she reached for a cardigan hanging off her chair and her lanyard, complete with her access card to the lab. There was no point in getting dressed; she was always back in bed before May got up at five am, pretending she had been sleeping there all night.

Really, Jemma thought dryly as she clicked her bunk shut and padded down the silent hallway to the lab, she was becoming quite the double agent in her old age. Agent Weaver would be proud.

For the past few weeks since the incident in Boston, she had been working on SHIELD cases all day in the lab, putting on a smile and a laugh when required and helping Fitz to reorganise the Gifted index into her new and improved categories. At night, however, when everyone else was asleep and the lab was her own, Jemma was able to work on her own research.

She booted up the computer system and tapped in the access codes to her files; they came up on the screen exactly where she’d left them the night before. Jemma gave her data a brief scan, before reaching down to take off her watch. She had attached a miniaturised ECG to the back of it a week or so ago, to be able to record whether or not her heart rate rose when she felt herself clicking. So far, her results had been unanimous: when she ‘clicked’, her pulse spiked to almost four hundred beats per minute before dropping abruptly to barely fifty. Certainly, Jemma thought grimly, that explained why she always felt so off balance afterwards.

Aside from her ECG readings, she had data from micro EEG readers she had pressed underneath her hairline which recorded her brain activity during the day, as well as all the information her team had gathered on the monolith and its Kree designers, which she had transferred from the main SHIELD system to her own. She had also carried out her own research into areas they hadn’t covered, and from all of this Jemma was piecing together a theory.

It wasn’t a particularly nice theory. In fact, it was one that scared the hell out of her. It scared her so much that even thinking about it for too long made a cold fist clench at her stomach and her palms sweat, but Jemma forced herself to work past the fear. Slowly, the theory was growing, and with every passing day she was becoming more and more convinced by it.

Pursing her lips together, Jemma picked up the ECG to upload the data from the previous day.

‘Jemma?’

Jemma shot out of her chair as soon as she heard the voice, and stumbled over its legs in her vain attempts to hide her work behind her back.

 _Shit_.

‘Good morning, Fitz,’ she found herself saying, as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world for her to be in the lab at this time of night. Maybe, she thought desperately, if she made it seem normal enough he wouldn’t ask too many questions.

Fitz stood in the doorway, his hair rumpled with sleep and his eyes still partly glassed over. Jemma glanced down at him before she could stop herself and found to her dismay that she was blushing at the sight of him dressed in pyjamas. She had seen him in this state of undress multiple times before, sometimes at even closer range, but it had never managed to make her as hot under the collar as this.

Fitz blinked once, and then twice slowly, his eyes sweeping through the room as he took in the sight before him and the confusion on his face deepened.

‘What the _hell_ are you doing?’

Surely, there was any number of answers that she could give for this question. Any number of answers that would be able to make the situation look much less bizarre, excusable even. If only she could get her mouth to speak and stop floundering then maybe, just maybe, the right answer would come to her.

‘Working.’

 _Dammit_.

Fitz took a hesitant step into the lab. ‘At half past two in the morning?’

‘There was a lot of work I needed to catch up on. From before…’

‘No, there wasn’t. I told you, I handled it all while you were away with May and Skye.’

 _Ah_. So he had.

‘Well, then I thought it might be a good idea for me to get started on this new case. I couldn’t sleep, and there’s no time like the present…!’

Fitz’s tone turned incredulous. ‘We don’t have a new case. We only just finished up the logistics on the Manchester mission yesterday.’

Jemma’s mind was reeling, searching desperately for a reason he might believe.

‘Paperwork,’ she offered finally. ‘We’re horribly behind on time sheets, and expenses.’

Fitz’s eyes didn’t even move off her as he stepped forward to take a look at her computer screen. She slumped back from it in defeat, crossing her arms over her chest as he made a few swift clicks before turning back to her with a single raised eyebrow.

‘You’re not even logged into the main system. You’re on a private one and,’ he leant back to the monitor, ‘from the looks of it you’ve been logging into it every night for the past two weeks.’

Jemma stepped forward and looked where his finger was pointing. ‘Oh, would you look at that,’ she said weakly. ‘So I am.’

With a deep sigh, Fitz turned off the computer screen and twisted so he was facing her. Jemma’s fingers dug into the fabric of her cardigan and she kept her gaze trained on the floor, avoiding the quiet disappointment she knew she would see reflected in his eyes. For a moment, she felt eight years old again, caught doing something she shouldn’t have been, and the bitter embarrassment of it made the back of her throat burn.

‘Jemma,’ he said again, and his voice was softer this time.

She looked up and found to her surprise that he didn’t look disappointed, as she’d expected he would. Instead, he just looked sad and somehow that was infinitely worse.

‘Jemma, what are you doing?’

Her mouth opened again, but then closed as soon as she realised she no longer had the energy to offer him little white lies. Not this time. She shook her head, and bit down hard on her bottom lip. It was only when she tasted both blood and salt mingling on her tongue that she realised she was crying.

Fitz didn’t hesitate. With two steps, he had crossed the short distance between them and wrapped his arms around her, inviting her closer. Jemma accepted the invitation gratefully, stepping forward to press her face against his shoulder to stifle her tears.

They had always had a more tactile friendship than might have been deemed normal; working in such close quarters in the lab and later in their shared apartment hadn’t really allowed much space to be self-conscious. Since the early days at the Academy, they had been leaning across one another and brushing up close and the comforting familiarity of feeling his body next to hers like a fifth limb had been one of the things Jemma had missed the most over the past few months.

Right now, with her tears soaking through the thick flannel of his t-shirt, there felt like no safer place to whisper out the secret she had been holding inside of her for so long.

‘I…I think that something happened to me.’

She braced herself, waiting for his arms to loosen and for him to pull away from her, full of questions and demanding answers. She waited, but it didn’t happen.

Instead, Fitz stiffened against her and his arms tightened slightly, closing into a more protective stance. On top of her head, she felt his chin shift as he clenched his jaw. When he spoke, his words were grim, but there was a fervent determination to them that told her he wasn’t letting go off her that easily.

Not again.

‘Show me.’

 

And so she did.

She showed him the ECG and EEG readings, showing him the way that both her brain activity and pulse flared dramatically at apparent random points throughout the day, but always, she pointed out, at times when she was close to either Skye or Lincoln.

She showed him the research she had conducted into the lunar cycles of the Kree planet, however sparse the information she had uncovered had been, and then turned the small cube of rock that had been stuck in her throat around and around in her fingertips in front of him. She showed him the Kree alphabet and the words that they were still no wiser as to the definitions of.

She had to rely on anecdotal evidence for what her clicks actually consisted of, but that seemed to be enough for Fitz. After all, he had the memory of Boston still fresh in his mind. He listened to her, he examined every shred of evidence she presented him with and the vein protruding from his neck grew deeper.

Once she had shown him everything, Jemma took a deep breath.

‘I have a theory.’

Fitz was hunched over, still clutching the last data sheet she had given him. It was the one of her brain waves, and he was tracing the patter with his fingernail like he hoped it would lead him to an answer. ‘Okay.’

‘All this time, we’ve thought that the monolith was intended to be destructive, right? That it’s purpose was to…to kill?’

‘Well, yeah.’ Fitz frowned, his eyes still on the sheet of paper. ‘The thing’s Kree. The Kree wanted to destroy the Inhumans. It makes sense that they’d send down artefacts that would be dangerous for them, toxic maybe.’

‘Right.’ Jemma’s breath was starting to come out in shorter gulps and her hands were itching to curl into fists, but she pushed on. ‘But, see, I don’t think that’s what’s happening at all.’

Fitz’s eyes shifted up to her, suddenly blazing. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he demanded. ‘Of course it’s dangerous! It’s really bloody dangerous, Jemma, it almost killed you-‘

‘I know!’ she interrupted, and it came out far sharper than she had intended.

Fitz stopped, and when he looked at her Jemma could see the pain in his expression. She remembered the fleeting moments she could remember from being inside the rock when his fear and anguish had been palpable to her, even through the impenetrable face of the monolith. However hard the experience had been for her, Jemma knew that it had also been excruciating for him too.

The words she had spoken to him on their date in her room had been true. It was always hard being the one left behind.

‘You almost _died_ ,’ Fitz repeated, and there were tears in his eyes.

‘I know,’ Jemma said again, in a voice far softer than the first time. ‘And I’m getting to that part. I promise.’

On an impulse, she reached out and rubbed at the corner of his shoulder. Fitz started when she did, and a curious expression flickered across his features that Jemma couldn’t quite place – it was somewhere between disbelief and a quiet kind of sadness. She gave his shoulder a quick squeeze, hoping to relieve the pain, and the expression vanished. Fitz smiled weakly back at her and nodded his head with a silent acceptance.

‘Okay.’ He exhaled deeply. ‘Okay. Keep going.’

Jemma nodded back. ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘When you said that the Kree wanted to destroy the Inhumans, but I don’t think that the rock is what they sent to do that. Think about it, if you wanted to destroy an entire race of humans, what would you need?’

Fitz was quiet for a moment. ‘A weapon,’ he said eventually. ‘Preferably a sentient one, able to seek out the Inhumans on its own without having to be monitored or controlled. But you just said…’

‘Yes, I know, and that’s the thing.’ Jemma could feel her entire body vibrating at this point, with excitement or fear, she couldn’t quite tell. ‘I don’t think the monolith is the weapon _itself_. If it was, then it would be a very poor one; for starters, it’s stationary. It would have to lure its prey to it, and even when it had done that there’s very little room inside that thing. Hardly enough to hold the entire population of Inhumans loose on Earth! So, no. The rock _can’t_ be the weapon.’

Fitz was frowning again. ‘Then what is?’

Jemma took a deep breath. ‘I don’t think the monolith is destructive,’ she repeated. ‘I think it’s _transformative_. I think it’s _creating_ the weapon.’

The weight of her words seemed to hang in the air of the lab, and Jemma watched, holding her breath, as the meaning behind them sunk in for Fitz. He staggered against the counter, forcing himself to stand up straight.

‘Jemma, what are you-‘

‘Just think about it, Fitz!’

Her words were tumbling out now, her excitement overcoming her fear as she found herself able to vocalise for the first time the thoughts she had been collecting for weeks. It felt good, so, so _good_ to not have to horde them anymore. To be able to share them with him, like she’d always wanted.

‘Say you were creating an assassin, the most perfect assassin ever made. What would you want them to have? Skills, I mean. What skills would they need?’

Fitz shook his head in a daze, but he closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose so Jemma knew he was thinking. Whether he was humouring her or not, she couldn’t quite tell.

‘They’d need to know about their victim,’ he said at last. ‘Know about their past, their present, any-anything they might be able to use as…as _leverage_ , I suppose. Find their weakness.’

He looked up to her as he said the last sentence. Jemma noticed, and inside her heart something twinged, in a feeling that was not exactly unpleasant. She allowed it to happen, registered it, then pressed on.

‘Right.’ Grabbing a piece of scrap paper, she scribbled down his suggestion: ‘ _knowledge_ ’. Her handwriting was even more sprawled than normal her hands were trembling so much. ‘When I…when I _click_ , I see memories. That tells me about the person and what they’ve been through, sometimes even where they are now and even…’

Jemma trailed off, as she remembered how so many of Skye’s memories involved herself and the team. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, she saw the hula girl figure dancing.

‘…attachments,’ she continued. ‘Which could be possible weaknesses. And then after the memories, I get a brief experience of what their powers are…’

‘…which would prepare an assassin for the eventual encounter,’ Fitz finished for her.

‘Yes.’ Jemma swallowed, and brought forward the database pages on the three Inhumans they had found in Boston. Skye and Hunter had gone back the next day and brought the kids in safely, even cataloguing their powers. It was these sheets that Jemma now held in her hand.

‘Back in Boston, I…I felt lost. Utterly despaired, like everything…everything I loved had gone and there was nothing left for me.’ Her fingers hovered over the first teenager’s photograph. ‘His power is the manipulation of hope.’

‘Then, I heard voices. Dozens and dozens of voices and they were all inside my head and trying to get out.’ Jemma handed the second sheet, with the picture of the sour-faced Inhuman girl, to Fitz. ‘She’s a mind reader.’

She paused for a moment before picking up the last kid’s details. She’d left this one for last, knowing that this was the one that would hit the hardest.

‘After that…’ Jemma’s voice faltered. ‘After that, I suddenly found it very hard to…um…to breathe.’ Even with her head down, she could feel Fitz turn to look at her. Under his gaze, she ran her finger over the last boy’s face. ‘He…he has the ability to control oxygen. Give it or take it away at will.’

‘And you felt all of that,’ Fitz whispered, and when Jemma looked up at him he looked like the weight of the words had crushed him.

Instead of replying, Jemma found she could only nod and slid her fingers along the bench to cover his, which were still clenched over the edge. This time, Fitz didn’t flinch under her touch.

‘But, that wouldn’t be enough,’ he said. ‘Just knowing about the Inhumans wouldn’t be enough to make you an…an _assassin_ of them.’

Jemma took a deep breath and slipped back into scientist mode. ‘Right. And that’s what the problem is. With me, the monolith didn’t get to finish its transformation.’

Quickly, she scrabbled for some of her research. ‘I’ve been looking into the documents Skye found on the monolith. Some of them date back to Roman times and I’ve been able to find their original Latin formulations. The order of their words and the translations are hard, but one word appears more than any other. _Luna_.’

‘Moon,’ Fitz translated in a murmur.

‘I think that the transformation takes one complete Kree lunar cycle. All the times it dissolved before were random, yes, because it was still looking for a subject. Once it had one, it just had to complete the process, through one full lunar cycle.’

Jemma sighed, before finishing carefully: ‘I think that it _would_ have let me out, eventually, once it was…finished with that process. Once I was made into the weapon.’

Her words were turning cold and hard and clinical again and she could see that Fitz was struggling with that just as much as she was. Instinctively, she felt a tug at her insides to relieve some of that struggle.

‘But you saved me,’ she added quietly, in a whisper that wasn’t a part of her original theory. ‘Before that could happen.’

Fitz smiled, in a way that might have turned into a grimace if he wasn’t trying so hard to keep from crying.

‘So,’ he said with a sniff, his own voice clicking into the tone she recognised from ten years’ worth of scientific discovery together. ‘What do you think would have happened to you if we hadn’t?’

 _He said we_ , Jemma noted with a pang, _not I_.

‘Strength,’ she replied. ‘Strength to be able to cope with the flashes, and then feeling the powers. Because I can’t.’ This last part came out in a gasp, and it took Jemma a little while to realise why. ‘I can’t cope with it,’ she repeated.

Fitz frowned at her, and for a moment Jemma thought that he might reach out to hold her again. She wanted that, she realised, more than anything else, but she still had a lot to tell him.

‘And then I’d need some sort of ability of my own,’ she added quickly, before he could. ‘Something that _would_ be destructive, something that _would_ make _me_ the weapon. May…maybe just elimination. Annihilation. I don’t know how it would work, really.’ She shook her head helplessly. ‘I don’t know.’

Fitz nodded, slowly, still turning one of her many sheets of research over in his hand. Jemma waited, the nervous excitement from just minutes ago gone and a deep sense of exhaustion filling her chest in its place.

‘Is that the end?’ Fitz asked eventually.

Jemma hesitated. She considered lying to him, and leaving off the last part of her theory so neither of them had to deal with the pain of it. Avoiding things that hurt was so much easier than facing them.

But she was tired. Jemma realised how true this was even as she thought it; she was so bloody tired now that she just wanted everything to end. And if the only way for her to get to the end now was to grit her teeth and tell him the truth, then so be it. He deserved that, at least. They both did.

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘There’s one more part to it.’

‘So tell me.’

Jemma bit her bottom lip and gave an almost unnoticeable shake of her head. ‘I just…I don’t think you’ll believe me.’

‘Try me, yeah?’

She looked up, and found Fitz watching her carefully, a half smile on his face. He trusted her. He had trusted her enough to follow her into the field, trusted her enough to let her lead him wherever she went, even trusted her enough to know she would make his last breath worth giving up. He had trusted that she would hold on long enough for him to rescue her.

And if he could do that, then she could trust him enough to believe her now.

‘A motive,’ Jemma murmured. ‘In order to complete the transformation, the monolith would have had to give me a motive to want to harm the Inhumans.’

‘Well, that makes sense.’ Fitz straightened up and frowned. ‘Why…why did you think I wouldn’t believe you?’

‘Because there were some things that I said…and then things that you said that I thought might have given you the impression that I did want some harm to come to the Inhumans. I just thought that maybe…maybe you still believed that.’

‘No! No, I never…I mean, I didn’t…’ Fitz shook his head vehemently and screwed his eyes tightly shut, pinching hard at the bridge of his nose again. Jemma waited, the back of her throat burning more with every second.

‘I never believed that,’ he said, his voice shaking. ‘What I said back then, I didn’t…I wasn’t…I was upset. You’d hurt me and I wanted to hurt you back. So I said things that I knew would hurt.’

Jemma nodded; that made sense. It didn’t mean that it didn’t hurt like hell, like a kick to her stomach that made her want to double up and howl, but it made sense.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

‘Yeah.’ Fitz croaked the words out with a soft smile, and inside Jemma it felt like a dam had broken. ‘Yeah, me too.’

This time, it was her who moved forward to take him in her arms, wrapping her arms around his back carefully and allowing him to lean into her. Fitz’s body opened up to let her in, his own hands coming up to hold her at her shoulders and then tentatively letting one up to stroke her hair.

Jemma felt an ache deep in her gut as she realised how much she had been yearning for this for months, even more than she had wanted to work with him again. They had been gradually getting used to being physical with one another again; relearning one another’s movements, but there was still something very delicate about their touches. It was almost as if they thought that pressing too hard might shatter the other.

‘I suppose it’s quite fitting really, isn’t it?’ she said with a bitter laugh. ‘That it was me it chose to be the weapon, to…to destroy. I seem to be rather good at doing that, don’t I?’

Fitz tensed against her, but didn’t pull away. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘Us. You. Everything that’s happened, it’s all been my fault hasn’t it? What happened in the pod, and then afterwards…you not getting better. That was all my fault. I made everything worse.’

This time, Fitz did draw back, stumbling slightly as the realisation hit him. ‘That’s why you left,’ he whispered, understanding dawning on his face. ‘That’s why you left for Hydra? Because you thought you were…?’

‘I didn’t think, Fitz,’ Jemma said wearily. Her tears were falling freely now, dripping down her chin and clustering on her eyelashes. ‘I _knew_. Everybody did, even if they were too kind to tell me. Even _Mack_ could see it, for God’s sake, and after only one day!’ She gave a sob, which she quickly stifled with her hand, holding it over her mouth in a vain attempt to stop her crying.

Fitz was crying too, silent tears rolling down his face which he made no attempt to stop. Maybe he didn’t even know that he was crying them.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he whispered. ‘When I asked you why you left, why didn’t you say…?’ He trailed off, and Jemma looked up to see the pain behind his tear, pain she realised that was for her. ‘Jemma…’

She jerked her head away from him, suddenly not sure she deserved his touches any more. ‘I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want it to be true. I thought maybe if I didn’t say it out loud, if you didn’t know then maybe I could pretend…’

Jemma shook her head, knowing how frustratingly stupid that sounded. ‘It’s just…It’s always been my responsibility to look after everyone, to _fix_ people…fix them when they got hurt. And with you, I couldn’t do that and I couldn’t understand _why_. The one person I wanted to help more than anyone else in the world and I was utterly useless.’

She looked up again, only to see Fitz struggling, his face falling as all his memories from the past months changed before his eyes, all the unexplained twists suddenly unfolding to reveal a picture that hurt even more than the original had.

‘I’m so sorry,’ was all she could think to say.

Fitz shook his head. ‘No! No, you don’t have anything to…’

‘But I do!’ Jemma couldn’t help a small bubble of a laugh, which just turned into another sob. ‘I have so much I need to be sorry for.’

‘Not to me.’

‘Especially to you, Fitz,’ she whispered. ‘You were right, you know. Before. When you told me I was afraid; I was. I _am_. I’m always so afraid.’

Fitz blinked slowly, clearing the tears from his eyes. He was still close to her; he had hardly moved since pulling away from their hug. This close up, she could smell the familiar scent of his shower gel and the warmth of his still sleep-addled body.

‘What…what are you afraid of?’

Jemma closed her eyes for a fleeting moment, and underneath the desk her hands uncurled from fists she hadn’t known she was clenching. ‘I’m afraid of losing you.’

Fitz exhaled sharply and, slowly, he reached out to take her hand, sliding his fingers between her own and opening them up to let his fit inside. They did, like they had been fashioned to fit together. He was closer now, so close that with a single twist she could have been right back in his arms.

‘If that’s, um, something that I deserve an apology for,’ he said shakily. ‘Then I think I owe you one too.’

Jemma wasn’t quite sure how it happened after that, but then she was tilting her head upwards and he was bending down and somehow their lips met in the middle.

It was soft. That was the first thing Jemma could think as she found herself kissing him, kissing _Fitz_ , kissing her best friend in the world. He was so soft.

She didn’t know how she could have thought he could be anything else.

His hand around hers hadn’t tightened as their lips had pressed together, and his other hand was hovering at her cheek like he was too scared to actually make contact with her skin. His lips were warm and slightly rough against her own, but they were pressed there so lightly they felt more like butterflies wings rather than lips.

‘Fitz,’ Jemma gasped, pulling away just far enough so that their lips were no longer touching, ‘it’s alright. I’m not going to break.’

‘I know. I know you won’t.’ His words came out in a shudder, and he laughed in a single breath. ‘I’m just not so sure about me.’

‘You won’t.’

Her voice was firm, and it was the first firmness that has been between them all night. Jemma reached up to cover his hand with her own and helped it press into the side of her face. Fitz looked down to meet her eyes, and when he did, Jemma smiled at him.

Yes, he might be soft, but sometimes the softest of hearts held the most strength. And he was the strongest heart she knew.

‘I won’t let you.’

This time, when she leant upwards onto her toes to kiss him again, Jemma allowed herself to finally give him what she had been wanting to. The force of her kiss worked Fitz’s mouth open which made him start for a moment, before the tiny spark of electricity that had started in her chest seemed to move into his and his hand cupping her face became more determined.

As their kissing deepened, he let go of her hand, moving his own to hold her in the small of her back to fold her into him. Jemma found herself pressing even closer still, using her arms to steady herself as she brought them up to his chest, then his shoulders and neck while he held her.

Fitz’s lips were busy exploring hers and Jemma let them, revelling in the sensation that it brought as her hands dug into his collar and their teeth clashed in the middle. It felt he had lit a light inside of her, a light that had been dimmed for so long, and now she could feel an age-old ache lifting from her bones.

They were kissing, Jemma realised as she felt Fitz’s teeth nip her lip accidentally and she retaliated before he could mind, to steady the world beneath their feet. They were kissing to say sorry, to say all the apologies they had needed to say for months in one long, beautiful messy gesture, they were kissing to fit themselves back together again and to learn the new places their breaks had given them.

They were kissing because it was what they wanted to do.

It felt like a long time before they both stopped, in a silent and unspoken agreement. Neither of them pulled very far away though as they stood, breathing heavy and chests heaving together, foreheads still pressed into one another.

The world around them was still quiet, as it should be at four o’clock in the morning. All Jemma could hear was the sound of their breathing, the beating of her own heart and the slight ringing still in her ears.

Carefully, Fitz twisted his head to look at their hands. Somehow, they had managed to twist together again and as she watched he opened his fingers up to spread hers out like a fan.

‘We’ll have to tell the others,’ he said quietly. ‘In the morning.’

Jemma nodded against him, feeling her chin quiver. ‘I know.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘I’ll do it with you. Help you explain.’

‘I’d like that.’ She licked her lips and found that they were hot and chapped. ‘Thank you.’

‘It’s okay.’

Their words were few now, everything that had needed to be said had been said in the way they had pressed their lips and bodies and hearts together. After that, everything else was unnecessary.

Jemma looked down at her work scattering the bench and sighed. Fitz followed her gaze, and she felt his arms close just a little tighter around her.

‘We’ll figure it out,’ he murmured into her temple. ‘What…whatever this is. We’ll figure it out together, I promise. You and me.’

‘You and me,’ Jemma repeated, sealing the vow like a covenant.

‘And…’ Fitz paused before continuing and when he did she could hear the hesitant grin in his words. ‘When we go on our _third_ date, I swear I will take you somewhere nice. Preferably where they serve food. But most definitely away from the Playground.’

The laugh rose in her chest like a wave and Jemma drew herself back from his chest so she could smile back at him. ‘Fitz, to be perfectly honest, at this point I would be perfectly happy going on a date with you anywhere. Even if it’s the kerb outside the base.’

‘Now _that_ one I could actually arrange.’

Jemma laughed again as if it was the easiest thing in the world and stepped forward again back into his hug. Fitz folded his arms around her and she could feel his smiled pressed into the top of her hair.

It felt, Jemma decided, like she had finally come home.

‘I’m tired,’ she said after a while. Standing in the lab with Fitz’s arms holding her gently, but strong enough to know he wouldn’t let her fall was wonderful, but Jemma had a horribly embarrassing feeling that if she let him do that for much longer then she’d be falling asleep on her feet.

‘Okay.’ Fitz let go of her reluctantly and rubbed at his own eyes with a wry smile. ‘Back to bed then, yeah?’

Jemma nodded grateful and returned the smile. ‘Yeah.’

They left her papers on the table but tidied them up, placing them in the right order to show her theory to the others in the morning. Jemma considered for a moment how that was going to feel, everyone’s eyes on her as she tried to explain what she believed had happened to her. Somehow, the idea frightened her far less than it had at the start of the night.

Fitz watched her and when she had finished he reached out, as if to take her hand, before stopping short. Without hesitating, Jemma slipped her hand into his outstretched one and gave it a quick squeeze. The last of Fitz’s apprehension fell away from his face as he squeezed back and gave a slight tug to pull her towards the lab door.

Jemma paused for just a second at the threshold of the door and reached out to turn off the lights. The lab would be completely dark once she had, the only light coming from the computer monitor as the machine shut down.

Everything, she realised, was about to change.

But then she remembered Fitz’s hand holding her own in the darkness surrounding them, and the feeling of his lips on hers. Maybe change wasn’t always such a bad thing.

Jemma took a deep breath and switched off the lights, then turned away from the lab and into the corridor together with Fitz.

And she didn’t look back.

 

 

It had started with Skye.

Jemma wasn’t exactly sure how it would end, or even when it would end. If she was perfectly honest with herself, she didn’t even know if it _would_ end.

The only thing she did know was that when it ended, if it ended, she hoped it would end with her and Fitz, the two of them together. _You and me_. Just like she had always known it should be.

Just the way that she wanted it to be.

There was, at least, that that she could hope for. And for Jemma, that was more than enough to keep fighting for.


End file.
